Interesting Local Voter Facts

I went door to door yesterday collecting signatures to put candidates on the ballot and while I was messing with the street list data for my area I discovered a few interesting facts which are as follows.

In the East Lampeter 7th district there are…
1,702 Registered Voters
1,114 Republicans
380 Democrats
208 Other

Of the 1,702 Registered voters only 56 voted in the last 4 elections cycles.
Only 514 Voted in 2 of the last 4 elections cycles.

I’m going to buy the PA street list and see what kind of information I can pull from that.

All that to say more people need to vote and vote regularly.

  • http://bamainbetween.blogspot.com Joe Collins

    I also noticed a lot of my Republicans are old. As in 75+ old. They’re dropping like flies.

  • http://canthook.com Harl Delos

    All my life, I’ve been hearing people say that more people need to vote, and vote regularly.

    Why?

    If you don’t care to vote, if you aren’t willing to take the time to learn about the candidates and the issues, you are doing harm by casting an uninformed vote.

    One would presume that uninformed votes cancel each other out, but in fact, that’s not true. People with names that sound familiar, or that sound friendly have a significant advantage with voters who don’t know anything about the candidates. Someone named “Rick Brown” is likely to get more votes than “Arnold Pasternak” and here in Lancaster, someone with a local-sounding name like, say, “John Landis” would probably be a shoo-in.

    Scott Lee Cohen won the primary for Illinois Lieutenant Governor because people didn’t know anything about him. If only informed voters had cast their votes, that probably wouldn’t have happened – and he wouldn’t have been embarassed when the party asked him to withdraw, for what seems reasonable reasons.

    The patriotic thing to do is to become informed, and vote your own enlightened self-interest, but if you don’t have the time and energy to do that, or if you have done that and still don’t care one way or the other, it’d be polite to allow those who do care have their way, rather than making the election a coin-flip.

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